Last Big Push

5 weeks to race day. This is my last big push - and I will really need it.

Last week I fell ill (again) but this time it was a full-blown flu, complete with temperature, body ache, cough and congestion. It might have been Covid, which, apparently is doing the rounds again. It took a while to get over it and the aftermath ran into this week. To top it off, mid week, I got my period and my body felt extra-beat this morning as I set off on my long 18K run. Of course, as was to be expected, I could not complete it. Around 12.5K, (to my absolute dismay) I developed a funny pain in my left knee which would stop as soon as I stopped running. The pain was too intense to be ignored. Ended the run at the 13K mark. 

Was (still am) feeling quite bummed out about not just today's run but also the way the whole training is going. Actually considered (considering) stopping the training and not doing this event at all. These past 6 weeks or so, after every single long run, I would develop migraines later on in the day. Migraines of varying degrees. The longer the run, worse the migraine! I'm guessing its the combination of heat and exhaustion. I believe I've been pretty good with my hydration and fuelling but obviously there are still some gaps to be filled. 

Currently as I'm writing this, there is a dull throbbing in my head which makes me think:

Is it all worth it? 

Should I keep at it?

3/4ths done

 ...well, almost!

Time is flying by and just like that I'm almost at the end of the 3rd block in my training plan. Today I ran 17K. It took me 2 hrs, 9 minutes and 59 seconds. Which funnily enough, is my race day goal time (for the whole distance of 21.1K). Which means to say, I am running short of 4.1K! I have 7 weeks to go to race day. I'm not sure that I can improve by that much over the next few weeks, in order to close that gap...  This feels like a really, really, tough ask!

7'39" pace today.  6'09" goal pace.  6'17" was my 7K pace on Tuesday - which is much closer to 6'09" but I did take quite a few untimed breaks. I am barely able to sustain 1 mile at 6'09" and I think I should be able to sustain at least 4K at goal pace at this point in my training in order for goal pace on race day to become a reality.

Last week, my Garmin race time prediction dipped down to 2:36:35. It is currently showing 2:33:58. This is a bit of a bummer. The prediction times are supposed to go up not down! 

Oh well, we trust in the process and plod on!

Half way there!

11 weeks of training done and 10 more weeks to go. While the 1st 7 weeks went visibly well and I could see clear progress at the end of the "base-building phase", I'm not sure if the last 4 weeks of "picking-up-the-pace phase" has contributed to any significant progress. I'm sure there is incremental progress, for example, a 7'05" pace doesn't feel so bad now while it used to feel incredibly tough even 4-5 weeks back, but impatient me is looking for significant progress. Alas, thats never the case. Slow & steady: I must remind myself.

This week had me running 1Kx3 @ goal pace and while it was hard effort, it was doable. I managed all three sets at goal pace which is an improvement over the huffing-and-puffing 800mx2 @goal pace that I did 3 weeks ago. Small victories.Then I think that I will have to do 21 sets like than on race day without the rest intervals between sets and I'm back to thinking, maybe this is not enough progress.

It doesn't help my mental space that my Garmin's race time prediction hasn't improved at all in this time. In fact it keeps bobbing between 2:31 & 2:28. The hardest two blocks are coming up, hopefully that will be enough to shape me up and have me race ready by the time I'm lining up at the start on July 20th. We'll see. 

Training Blues...

 I'm nearly at the end of the 2nd block of my training and I'm not feeling the best.

Even though I've managed to check off most of my workouts this block, I've hit on some troubling spots that has slowed me down a bit, and managed to give me a bit of the training blues. I've always considered the long run of the week to be the most important one and when that doesn't go as planned, I feel a bit bummed out. The last two weeks, I've had to swap out my 90 minute run for an indoor run of the same duration. Its better than nothing but I feel a bit less "trained" than I ought to be. I know that that bit is mostly in my head, but still!

To elaborate on those troubling spots that I mentioned : I've been having a bad run of restless, sleepless nights. No idea what might be the cause of this, but I feel less recovered going into the next day's workouts. I've been feeling flu-y since last Thursday. Its just an itchy throat and a general feeling of bunged-up-ness but it doesn't feel great. This also comes with a side of lethargy which is simply not helping. The worst of all, Friday morning I woke up with a pain in my right knee! No idea why. I went to bed with the knee feeling perfectly fine, wake up, and its throbbing! I'm thinking I must have slept funny and that might have stirred up old feelings in the knee - which has never really been the same since my injury back in 2018.

All that being covered, this week is cutback week - which is ideal. The knee thing seems to have subsided now and though I'm still feeling flu-y, I have enough energy to handle this week's low intensity, lower mileage training. Although, I do plan on getting in that skipped tempo WO from last week for good measure. Good thing thats only on Thursday - I'm hoping I'll be well and recovered by then.

More notes down the line.

Week 6!!

Week 6!! We've got roughly 13 weeks to go. Every week that I can stay the course, injury-free, is reason enough to celebrate! :)

Last week I started Block 2 of my training plan. Block 2 & 3 are considered the "build phase" where you're supposedly increasing mileage, building strength and working on getting faster. The intensity just got amped up. Last week's interval workout involved running 1 mile at goal pace. Sadly, I wasn't there yet. I think I started the workout with a "I don't think I got this" mind-frame, and found myself fading at around 700m. So instead of 1 mile @6'09" I ended up doing 800m x2 @6'13". Plenty of scope for improvement here. Have accordingly tweaked next week's 2 mile run @goal pace to 1Kx3 at goal pace. Heres hoping that goes better.

I really feel like I'm getting into each morning's workout with less than ideal sleep / recovery the previous night - which obviously has a negative impact on the run. Summer is truly upon us now and even the nights are super hot and sultry which doesn't lend itself to a proper, restful sleep. Also, since I've started waking up at 4:30 in order to start my runs earlier, I ought to be going to bed a little earlier (ideally 8:30, but that just seems ridiculously early to me!) to try and log the optimum 8 hours sleep. Something to work on.

More updates to follow. :)

I signed me up!!!

The registrations for DRHM2025 opened up on Monday this week. And I signed up for it today. Its now become very real. Theres no backing out now. We're doing this!!!

Race week is about 14 weeks away. My goal as announced previously is to complete the half marathon in 2:10:00. I'm training diligently for it and am 80% confident that I can get there. Yes, only 80% confident because self-doubting moments are quite frequent given that I haven't done a half marathon race in 7 years and my past PB is 2:16:38. 

My Garmin watch (that I upgraded a year and a half ago) has this cool feature, where you can log in the event that you're training for in the app, and it will predict your finish time based on your current fitness / training. So depending on how you are progressing with your workouts, the watch adjusts its prediction accordingly. For me its very heartening to see that the prediction has gone from 2:40:something at the very beginning to 2:34:16 to currently 2:30:51. I'm hoping it will keep dropping over the course of my training and that the day before the race, it will show 2:10:00. Now, that would be a great confidence booster!!!

1qtr Done! :)

And just like that the 1st block of my training is done! As mentioned earlier, I had split my 21 weeks of training into 3 weeks of base building, and 4 blocks of 4 weeks of race training at progressive intensities followed by a couple of weeks of tapering. We're now 7 weeks down and things are looking good. I'm glad to see that have I've been able to check off about 90% of the planned workouts, I'm not fatigued, and best of all, that I am injury-free (knock on wood). Looking back to the start of the 7 weeks, I can see that there has been some progress and that is definitely a motivating factor to keep going.

Up until now, the workouts have been relatively easy. When I say easy, what I actually mean is "not-intimidating". For example, when I see "75 min run" on the calendar, it feels very doable in my head. And when I see paces of 5'30" and 6'09" on there for 1 or 2 minutes, also it feels very doable. In the coming weeks though, we're going to be amping it up. I have a 1 mile @ goal pace run scheduled for Thursday and that does feel quite a bit daunting. Actually the idea of running at any pace thats quicker than 7'00" for a sustained period itself is very intimidating at the moment. The hope is that, that feeling changes over the course of the next few weeks. Trust in the process right?

Maintaining

There! Week 2 and 3 of my training block done! 

Week 2 went off relatively well except that I ended up having to swap my weekend's long outdoor run for an equally long indoor run and my weekly mileage was a smidge less than target. During my week of travelling i.e. Week 3, I had to make several tweaks to my training plan. Too many late nights, diet all over the place and also my periods showing up early meant making many compromises and choosing to sleep in for proper recovery rather than pushing through a run on a sleep deprived state (I've wised up these days!). 

To summarise, I came up 1 run short and had to swap a couple of the remaining ones for equivalent indoor runs. My weekend long run was cut short because my watch battery ran out and also I was really, really tired and wasn't quite "feeling it". There was no swimming at all :(. I had some resistance bands on hand so managed to get in 3 out of 5 strength sessions using these and body weight.  On Friday however, I did manage to make use of the steep slope leading up to my home and got in a "hill run"  which felt pretty good and was the highlight of my training week!

Given all the circumstances, training has been satisfactory. While I can't tell if theres been much progress, theres definitely not been any regression either.

Next week was meant to be cut-back week. (I'd slotted in a low mileage week after every 3 weeks to help in recovery). But considering that Week 3 was rather light in terms of effort, I'm keeping Week 4 as a do-over week to make up for the missed workouts from Week 3 but still light enough to be able to transition to Block 2 with enough energy & mojo. Lets see how that goes.

Progress!!

So while this running journal blog is a super helpful tool for me, it struck me that it possibly makes for very dry reading.. :) I might just have to insert a plot twist here and there to make it a more interesting account. Although, I hope not. Steady progression may be quite boring to read (and write) about but in training, rather desirable!

So theres Week 1 of my training. Touchwood, it all went according to plan. My 7K time went from 52 something minutes down to 50 minutes which felt great, so this week I'm aiming to repeat that (shave off those 8 seconds...) The tempo run for the week went well : 6x30s strides. Although, I had to get it done on the treadmill because my morning got away from me and it just became too late (too hot) to run on the road. The long run for the week also went well. I covered about 9.8 km in 75 minutes - 400meters further than last week - and then I just had to run for another minute to round the distance off to a nice neat 10K. :) Also managed to fit in 3 strength sessions, 3 swim sessions and 7 mobility sessions... check, check, check! Overall, good week!

I'll be travelling later this week and so am anticipating some disruptions to the plan. Will hopefully be able to work around it and still get my weekly mileage done..

Full-on Training Mode

 :)

Today I entered full-on training mode. 18 weeks to race day! My training calendar is divided into 4 blocks of 4 weeks each and then a couple of weeks for tapering. As of now, I have a skeletal plan for the whole 18 weeks in place and then as I progress, I will be fleshing it out one block at a time.

Weekly Long Run

Once a week I have me running a long duration run (ideally at an easy pace). Conventionally, training plans will have you running incremental long distances once a week till you build up to about 90% (typically) of the race distance. Typically HM training plans will have you start at 10 or 11K and build up to about 19 or 19.5K by peak week. And week-on-week the distance increment will be about 10% (not more). 

I like to look at my long run from a time-on-feet perspective than distance covered. This (supposedly) reduces chances of injury by reducing the possibility of overtraining. So for the first block my long run is going to be for 75 minutes, then 90 minutes for the next block, then 105 and so on. Consecutive weeks of running a fixed amount of time gets your body & mind used to being on the move for that amount of time and (theoretically) the distance covered in the duration starts to feel easier and easier.

Every 4th week is cutback week where I'll be reducing the time-on-feet and weekly mileage to help the body recover before jumping into the next block of higher training intensity.

Tempo & Interval Runs

Once every other week I'll be doing a Tempo run. Tempo runs are meant to be "comfortably hard". These will be shorter distances at goal pace to get the body used to running at that pace. And every other week I have interval runs scheduled. These are even shorter distances run at a pace faster than goal pace. The idea here is to improve overall running power. I found a 16 week HM training plan on one of my go-to running blogs called Run To The Finish and I've adapted the tempo & interval workouts from there. Have never tried these workouts before so this should be fun!

My weekly 7K runs

I've written about this before - one of my mental hacks to run a Half Marathon is to think of it as a 7Kx3 and then a little bit more rather than 21.1K. Looking at the distance as bite-sized mini chunks makes it seem much more doable. Its true what they say, that long distance running is more of a mental game than a physical one. If I can comfortably run 7K under 43 minutes, then I know that I can run the HM in my goal time of 2hrs and 10 minutes. So I've dedicated Tuesdays to working on my 7K time. Currently that comfortable time is 52 minutes (7'30" pace) I need to work this down to 42 minutes by Week 14 or so and then I'll know that goal time is a definite possibility.

Easy Runs

In addition to these runs, I'll also be throwing in a couple of easy runs during the week probably 30-45 minutes duration to make up the weekly mileage, and to maintain general aerobic fitness. Given my propensity to get injured, and to avoid possibly doing too much, these will most likely be done indoors - flat surface, controlled environment, less impact, lower heart rate and all that.

Swimming & Strength Training

Now that I have regular access to a pool and because I love it, I have scheduled 3 days a week of swimming. Swimming is a great cross training tool anyways and great for recovery. If I feel up to it, it may even be 4 or 5 times a week.

Because its absolutely essential and non-negotiable, and not because I love it, I have scheduled 3 days a week of strength training. In the past, I've not strength trained nearly enough which is one of the top reasons why I have had to go through so many niggling injuries. Of late though, I've found several workout videos (mostly fitness influencer reels on instagram) that are sort-of appealing and I have been trying them out for myself at home. This has had some mediocre success in keeping me interested enough to strength train consistently for at least 20 minutes a day, three times a week for the past few weeks. Hopefully this trend continues.

So thats the whole breakdown of my 18 week training plan. More updates on how I progress with it in the ensuing weeks. 

Base Week 3

The three weeks of "honeymoon" phase of my training plan is now done and I'm somewhat happy with the way things are going. I'm most happy with the fact that a pace of 6'09" feels hard but it doesn't feel that farfetched to think of being able to run the whole 21.1K at that pace 18 weeks down the line. Fingers crossed that my training continues smoothly without any interruptions.

Yesterday's long run of 75 minutes felt torturous (mostly because I was running it on a 300m loop). There was a time when I considered running 10K in 75 minutes to be "easy peasy" - I am barely able to do 9.5K now. Theres lots of scope for improvement. One other worry is that about 60 minutes into the run, I started feeling a familiar niggling pain on the outside of my right knee. Yes, the very same pain that I worked through back in 2023/2024 when I was training for my 20 miler. I took a teeny break, did a couple of stretches and was able to continue with the balance 15 minutes pain-free. This is of significant concern and I'm going to have to be very mindful of this issue flaring up again. Going to continue with my strength training sessions with a special focus on knee strength and prehab exercises to prevent the pain from cropping up again and becoming a serious issue.

Tomorrow is Day 1 of the full-on 18week training plan. As always, more updates to follow..

Base Week 2

Base week 2 did not go as per plan. Early on in the week I felt poorly and thought I was coming down with some flu and decided to go a little easy on the training. Thankfully it did not break out and I didn't get too sick but I did get my periods later on the week which came with some unusually painful cramps which affected my sleep, my energy and my overall will to do anything productive.

So while training did dip, it didn't flatline. I did manage a weekly mileage of 19.1K (instead of the intended 28K) and some other cross training activities however, every single activity was graded as "Strained" by my Garmin including a very mild 20 minute mobility session! I'm not sure if this is some glitch to be ignored or if I should take it seriously and reduce my training load. (I feel fine!) I have 1 more week of my "honeymoon phase" so I am going to stick to my original plan and play it by ear.

Heres to more green ticks for the coming week.

Base Week 1

Week 1 of Base building done and I'm feeling pretty good about it.  

Now, about my goal! Last week I mentioned that I had a goal in mind and that I would set it in stone once I start the training and am able to judge where I stand. After this 1st week of base building, I feel pretty confident about the goal that I've set for myself. At the moment, it does sound a bit lofty but its not impossible or even unrealistic. 

My PB in the half marathon distance is 2hrs 16 minutes something. I set this back in 2018 and I haven't done a half marathon race since. I also don't have any other recent long distance race times to go by. So this goal may seem like I just pulled it out of nowhere and in a sense thats probably true. Given the huge gap between the races, experts may tell me I shouldn't expect to PB in this upcoming race but my rationale is: why not? So I'm aiming for 2:10:00.  :) (But I'll also settle for anything under 2:16:00 just that for training planning, a good, round 2:10:00 works nicely)

There is a significant gap between my current pace (expected finish time for a HM at current levels would be around 2:35:00 I would say) and goal pace. But I didn't say that this plan wouldn't take work. I have 20 weeks to go and I'm willing to put in the time and effort. Or at least try. Plus, a challenge is always more motivating and will keep me on my toes during this training block.

The other day, I was listening to a running podcast (running explained) and the episode was about half marathon training and setting a realistic goal pace (mine's 6'09" to a km btw) and it talked about how the bulk of training should be at easy pace and dedicate maybe 1 run a week to goal-pace work. The body must get used to running longer distances at the goal pace so that its ready for Race day but that doesn't mean that every run should be run at goal pace because that would just lead to exhaustion & burn-out. So every week, schedule in a tempo run of 2miles, 1mile or 1K or 800m repeats at goal pace. It was also mentioned that if you can't run even 800m at your goal pace, then it is probably an unrealistic goal to set. 

So I put that to test on Friday and woohoo... I could run 800m at 6'09" (more or less). It felt hard but I can work on it. Today I ran 60 minutes on ground after a long, long time. Just about covered 7.7 km. Thats a 7'48" pace. These long runs are meant to be easy and I'm not putting any pace pressure on them. I need to feel confident about going long again while remaining strong. (Although, 7'48" pace didn't feel too easy. comfortably hard I would say it was). The problem is that these days, I'm running these long distances on a torturous 300m loop. Round and round and round - 60 minutes felt like forever but I got it done!

So theres Week1 in a snapshot... Lots of green checks. Got to keep this going. 2 more weeks of base training (or as I call it the honeymoon phase / confidence building phase) and then full-on HM training.. :)

Time for the next one

I'm signing up for a half marathon. Its been about 7 years since my last one

Earlier this year, it struck me that the 10yr anniversary of my first half marathon was coming up. In July, 2015, I ran my first ever 21.1 at the Dream Runners Half Marathon Event. I decided then that I would run this year’s edition of DRHM to commemorate this milestone. But given my current training status and the fact that I haven't been running all that much,  I imagine my timing would be even slower than my very first half. Can’t have that!

So then, why not train for it? Diligently and properly like I did for my very first one. Set a realistic goal, learn from all the many training mistakes I’ve made in the past and give it my best shot?

I have 21 weeks to go and a "realistic" goal in mind which I will set in stone over the next three weeks. The next three weeks is earmarked as base training which are basically meant to set me up for the goal-based training over the ensuing 18 weeks. Depending on how these base training weeks go, I may or may not adjust this said goal. :) 

More updates coming soon...